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The purpose of this paper is to argue for an integrated explanation of financial fraud. Greater emphasis must be placed on the structural and situational factors that are the elements of fraud risks and fraud.

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the explanation of financial fraud. Both micro- and macro-theoretical explanations of fraud were analysed to allow for a broader picture of the types of individuals that were involved in fraud, the rules governing their conduct and the types of law they broke.

The main reason why people commit fraud is that their crime propensity interacts with the elements present in criminogenic environments. Indeed, because most of the research on structural theories of fraud focuses on general criminality, not much has been done in the area of financial fraud. More research needs to be carried out to excavate the subterranean cluster of narrative on fraud risks and fraud.

To address the future contingency of fraud risks, the paper adopted a similar position of prior accounting research on financial crimes. The structural explanation of fraudulent behaviour considers individuals’ actions to be less the result of individual deviance and more the cause of societal forces. Structural theories take into consideration the individual psychology of the offenders and position it to reflect the various realities – institutional, structural and cultural life – they are caught up in. Future research must endeavour to address these concerns.

The manuscript is among a new stream of literature that addresses the structural elements of financial fraud.

Supply chain fraud is a significant global concern for firms, consumers and governments. Evidence of major fraud events suggests the role of supply chain structures in enabling and facilitating fraud, as they often involve several parties in complicated networks designed to obfuscate the fraud. This paper identifies how the structural characteristics of supply chains can play an important role in enabling, facilitating and preventing fraud.

The research follows a theory elaboration approach. The authors build on structural holes theory in conjunction with a multiple case study research design to identify new concepts and develop propositions regarding the role of network structure on supply chain fraud.

This research shows how structural holes in a supply chain can create advantages for unscrupulous firms, a role we call tertius fraudans, or the cheating third. This situation is exacerbated by structural ignorance, which refers to the lack of knowledge about structural connections in the network. Both structural holes and structural ignorance can create information gaps that facilitate fraud, and the authors propose solutions to detect and prevent this kind of fraud.

This paper extends structural holes theory into the domain of fraud. Novel concepts including tertius fraudans, structural ignorance and bridge collapse are offered, alongside a series of propositions that can help understand and manage structural supply chain fraud.

This chapter suggests that moving beyond positivism entails a recognition that the social world is made up of complex phenomena that are heterogeneous, and events are caused by contingent conjunctures of causal mechanisms. To theorize the social world as heterogeneous is to recognize that social causes, categories, and groups combine different kinds of phenomena and processes at various levels and scales across time. To speak of conjunctural causation implies not only that events are caused by concatenations of multiple, intersecting forces but also that these combinations are historically unique and nonrepeatable. Both the historical materialist conception of the “conjuncture” and the poststructuralist theory of “assemblages” take heterogeneity and multicausality seriously. I compare and contrast these formulations across three dimensions: the structure of the apparatus, causation, and temporality. I argue that these theories offer useful tools to social scientists seeking to engage in complex, multicausal explanations. I end the article with an example of how to use these concepts in analyzing a complex historical case.

Purpose – The integration of librarians and technologists to deliver information services represents a new and costly organizational challenge for many library administrators. To understand how to control the costs of integration, this study uses structural contingency theory to study the coordination of librarians and technologists within the information commons.

Design/methodology/approach – This study tests the structural contingency theory expectation that an organization will achieve higher levels of performance when there is a positive relationship between the degree of workflow interdependence and the complexity of coordinative structures necessary to integrate these workflows. This expectation was tested by (a) identifying and collecting a sample of information common; (b) developing and validating survey instruments to test the proposition; and (c) quantitatively analyzing the data to test the proposed contingency theory relationship.

Findings – The contingency theory expectations were confirmed by finding both a positive relationship between coordination and interdependence and a positive relationship between perceptions of performance and degree of congruency between interdependence and coordination.

Limitations – The findings of this study are limited to both the context of an information common and the structures tested. Future research should seek to both broaden the context in which these findings are applicable, and test additional structural relationships as proposed by contingency theory

Practical implications – This study contributes to the library profession in a number of ways. First, it suggests that managers can improve IC performance by matching coordination structures to the degree of interdependence. For instance, when librarians and technologists are strictly co-located, managers should coordinate workflows using less resource-intensive policies rather than meetings. Second, the instruments developed in this study will improve the library manager's ability to measure and report unit interdependence and coordination in a valid and reliable manner. Lastly, it also contributes to the study of structural contingency theory by presenting one of the first empirical confirmations of a positive relationship between interdependence and coordination.

Originality/value – This study represents one of the first empirical confirmations of the structural contingency theory expectations of both a positive relationship between workflow interdependence and coordination, and a positive relationship between performance and coordination's fit to workflow interdependence. These findings are of value to both organizational theorists and to administrators of information commons.

Economic crime is too varied an activity to be explained by a single theory. Valuable insights are gained from theories that focus on individual characteristics and on the socio‐economic context of crime, but these theories are not sufficient explanations of economically motivated crime. They are usefully supplemented by legal responsiveness theory, which focuses on the capacity of the economic system to provide legal means to adapt to economic change. This theory acknowledges the insights of chaos and cellular automata theory into the inevitable and unpredictable nature of economic change. Variation in the system's capacity for legal responsiveness to unpredicted change is hypothesized to have an impact on crime. Economic crime can be an indication of dysfunction in the adaptation systems of the economy. The concepts of ecological and evolutionary economics such as stability, resilience, connectedness and adaptation offer an approach to analyzing the systemic property of legal responsiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to use the theoretical perspective of structural inertia as a unique lens to study foreign sequential entry mode choices of multinational firms.

It adopts quantitative analysis of a sample of 121 Chinese publicly listed firms with 564 foreign entry incidents in the 2001-2012 period to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results show that multinational firms have a tendency to adopt the same mode in the subsequent entry as the number of prior entry mode choice of a given type (joint venture (JV) in this study) increases. The results support the theoretical prediction that organizations repeat their past activities due to structural inertia. Moreover, such an inertia effect in foreign sequential entry mode choices becomes stronger for older multinational firms, larger multinational firms and state-owned multinational firms.

Consistent with existing research, this study focuses on the entry mode choice between JV and wholly owned subsidiaries. However, it is better to examine the relationship identified in the study for different types of entry mode choices to assess result generalizability.

It reminds managers of multinational firms that they should be cautious to the influence of structural inertia that can be a barrier to strategic flexibility when they make entry mode choices.

The main contribution of this study resides in introducing structural inertia perspective to help understand the determinants of foreign sequential entry mode choices of multinational firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of organisational, relational and individual experiences in the creation and development of intellectual capital.

This is a conceptual paper, exploring the relationship between theories accounting for organisationally relevant experience and intellectual capital. A three‐dimensional model of human, structural and relational capital is used as a conceptual framework of intellectual capital, representing three levels of organisational behaviour. An understanding of the role of experience in developing human capital is provided by referring to experiential learning theory; the development of relational capital is explored from a social capital perspective; and structural capital from the vantage point of structural inertia theory and theories of organisational culture.

These theories suggest that experiences can be beneficial to intellectual capital development, but also potentially harmful if not managed effectively. Implications for organisations are considered and recommendations made for the use of experience so that it contributes effectively to the creation of the stock of intellectual capital. The paper concludes with recommendations for further research.

Against a background of a dearth of conceptual development in this area, these theories provide some understanding of the role of organisational, relational and individual experiences in the creation of intellectual capital.